Qué Celeste Festival Formentera is back! 23 and 24 September, Qué Celeste Festival Formentera will organise circus activities, workshops, lectures and music at Plaça de l'Església in Sant Ferran.

See the activities poster below

14 September 2022
Communications Office
Consell de Formentera

The Formentera Office of Tourism is pleased to report that from 5 and 8 September, Formentera was promoted at ILTM Asia Pacific 2022 in Singapore. Carlos Bernús, chief of promotion, was present at the trade show, where Formentera was presented as a destination that offers unique experiences to visitors.

Bernús met with representatives of travel agencies from India, China, Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Korea and Singapore. "This fair connected us with a type of market that is very interested in our destination. Recent years have seen these travellers increase in number, and that can help boost the trend of travel outside of the peak season months. This is a group that is used to long stays, that travels during our low season and does not mind that the weather is not summer", said Bernús.

During the months of September and October, agents from some of these countries will take part in familiarisation trips to help promote Formentera in their markets and create synergies with island businesses to collaborate and continue moving away from a summer-centred model of tourism. As always, the island is promoted as a destination for sustainable tourism, with, according to Bernús, "magical nooks where you can live unique experiences involving culture, heritage, sports and contact with nature".

9 September 2022
Communications Office
Consell de Formentera

Today Ana Juan, Consell de Formentera president, together with Iago Negueruela, Balearic minister of economic model, tourism and labour; Alejandra Ferrer, Consell de Formentera vice president and councillor of tourism, and Llorenç Pou, general director in the Balearics of economic model and employment, announced in press conference that Formentera will now have disaggregated tourism data after intense and coordinated efforts between the Balearic Institute of Statistics (Institut Balear d'Estadística, IBESTAT) and the National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE).

In this way the Balearic Government addresses a long-standing local plea and methodological effort to obtain disaggregated data for the island. The data will provide a clearer picture of local tourism and a better understanding of Formentera's visitors and related trends in the short, medium and long term.

President Juan said that differentiated data between the islands marked the fulfilment of a local request and called it "very good news". "This instrument will afford us a more complete understanding –of the tourists who visit us; of excursionistes, which we've always said that Formentera needs to regulate; of tourist spending, and of issuing markets– in definitive data that help us design promotional policies and complement the data of the Formentera Data Observatory".

Vice President Ferrer welcomed the fulfilment of Formentera's request to have data segregated by islands, and voiced hopes that now "IBESTAT and the Formentera Data Observatory can collaborate and unify methodologies for more accurate data. This will put us in a position to determine promotional policies, see where tourists spend their money and direct our support for various sectors. This information will directly impact residents and their quality of life".

IBESTAT will provide Formentera's tourism data as it already does with Eivissa, Menorca and Mallorca: monthly in summer and quarterly the rest of the year.

Day-trippers, a differential element
Data for Formentera will not only include the number of tourists, visitor profiles, spending and origin, it will also be uniquely differentiated. Since Formentera is an island where some visitors arrive in the morning and leave the same day, information on these visitors, known as "excursionistes" (day-trippers), has been included.

From now on, Formentera will have statistics on the number of visiting day-trippers.

Greatest recovery of tourist spending
Tourism on Formentera has rebounded as on neighbouring islands and currently tourism is more profitable than it was before the pandemic. Tourist spending has grown 44% since 2021 and is up 19% compared to 2019. Total tourist spending (i.e. cumulative spending from January to July) is higher than it was in 2019 and Formentera is the only island that by last year had essentially returned to 2019 levels. This increased spending has been achieved without changes in the number of tourists, a sign of increased profitability.

8 September 2022
Communications Office
Consell de Formentera

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Formentera submits plans to implement Es Ca Marí sanitation grid with funding from ITS

The Consell de Formentera has answered a yearly call for proposals for Promoting Sustainable Tourism (Impuls del Turisme Sostenible) with plans to implement a sanitation grid in Ca Es Marí. According to Alejandra Ferrer, vice president and councillor of tourism, projects associated with the Sustainable Tourism Tax (Impost de Turisme Sostenible, ITS) are crucial for the island because they "create the possibility of special funding for projects like the Es Ca Marí sanitation grid. This is a very important request by area residents and will reduce our reliance on outfalls and move us towards the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely around clean water and sanitation".

This project will provide this nexus of tourism with a sewerage system in which waste water is treated at the local treatment plant and pulled from the irrigation pond to irrigate the island's fields and close the water cycle.

The works will cost an estimated €1.5 million, with the Consell de Formentera covering 16% (€250,000) and requesting that the remaining 84% (€1.25 million) be paid for with funding from the ITS. Plans will be carried out in three phases: winter 2022, winter 2023 and 2023-2024.

1. Phase "zero", currently planned for 2022: land acquisition (€250,000).
2. Phase one, currently planned for 2023: canals inside the town (€500,000).
3. Phase two, currently planned for 2024: pumps and remaining canals (€500,000).

The Consell de Formentera and Es Ca Marí Residents' Association have held several meetings in which both parties agreed on the primacy of a sewage system where waste water generated in Es Ca Marí can be sent to the island's water treatment plant to close the water cycle using the tertiary water irrigation pond to irrigate local fields.

Developing the "Planned execution of the municipal sewage network for Es Ca Marí settlement area (phase one)" project required a one-off modification of the Territorial Island Plan (Pla Territorial Insular, PTI), including a rezoning of the land in question.

Among the objectives of this and other ITS-funded projects are:

- Climate change mitigation and adaptation: replacing existing materials with more efficient and sustainable ones. The initiative will safeguard against leaks, clogging and rainwater permeability, and ensure that the general pump reaches, first, Formentera's waste water treatment plant, and second, the irrigation pond, where it can reused by the local primary sector.
- Sustainable blue economy, marine biodiversity and marine science: improving the quality of waste water and how it is used to reduce the amount of water leaving the outfall and protect marine biodiversity.
- Circular economy: under current plans, the local irrigation pond will be supplied with waste water, thus closing the water circle on Formentera, decreasing consumption of water from the desalination plant and reducing the amount of water entering the sea from outfalls. For this to be possible, water that reaches the irrigation pond must be high quality, and improving the irrigation pond will benefit the local primary sector as well as locally grown produce and locally made items.

8 September 2022
Communications Office
Consell de Formentera